Saint Otger was born in Northumbria, that fruitful nursery of missionaries in the north of England, and he belonged to the generation of monks who, in the century of Willibrord and Boniface, went out from their island to carry the Gospel to the peoples of the continent. Tradition counts him, with Saint Plechelm, among the disciples of Saint Willibrord, the apostle of the Frisians. He was ordained no higher than deacon, and in that humble rank of service he remained: a man of the Gospel book and the altar, content to be a helper of bishops rather than a bishop himself.
With his companions Wiro and Plechelm, Otger first made the pilgrimage to Rome, to the tombs of the Apostles, seeking there the blessing and the mandate of the Vicar of Christ. At Rome, according to the received account, Wiro and Plechelm were consecrated bishops by the Pope — most probably Sergius I — while Otger, the deacon, was joined to them as their fellow laborer. From Rome the three turned north, into the country of the Rhine, the Waal and the Maas, where paganism still held large tracts of the land and where the Christian faith was young and thinly rooted.
Their apostolate found a friend in Pepin II, Pepin the Middle, mayor of the palace, who gave them land near Roermond upon a hill afterwards called the Sint-Petrusberg, at the place now known as Sint Odiliënberg. There, about the year 706, they built a church and a small monastery. It became the center of their preaching: a house of prayer from which the three went out to the villages and returned to the psalmody and the common life. Of Otger it is said that he enlightened several parts of the diocese of Utrecht and the neighboring lands with the faith of Christ. In Stadtlohn, in Westphalia, he is honored as the founder of the oldest church of the town.
Otger died in the eighth century, most probably about the year 713, and by tradition was buried at Sint Odiliënberg beside his companions. The three were not separated in death: the basilica on the hill, dedicated until 1686 to Saint Peter, was rededicated on 10 May 1686, after a great restoration, to Saints Wiro, Plechelm and Otger, and relics were brought thither from Roermond for the occasion. In a shrine there some of Otger's relics are still preserved with those of the holy bishops. Other relics are venerated in the Martinikerk at Groningen and in the Church of Saint Martin at Utrecht.
In the tenth century Bishop Balderic of Utrecht declared Otger a saint, and his cult spread widely through the Low Countries and the Rhineland. He is the patron of Stadtlohn, where the church of Saint Otger bears his name, and he is reckoned among the holy patrons of the Netherlands. At Groningen his memory is tied to the oldest church of the city — the present Martinikerk, one of whose predecessors may well have been dedicated to him, and where a vault painting of the saint may still be seen; in the Middle Ages his name day, 10 September, was the customary payday of the town, so deeply had the deacon's feast entered into common life. His feast is kept on 10 September, though 9 September is also given, and in some places he is honored with Wiro on 8 May or with Plechelm on 15 July. Artists give him the Gospel book and the cross in his hands — the two instruments of a deacon's whole life, the word he proclaimed and the Passion he served.
The name Otger is also borne by a wholly different figure, the legendary Otger Cataló of the fifteenth-century Catalan chronicles, invented to explain the name of Catalonia; he is not the deacon of Sint Odiliënberg, and the saint's honor rests instead on the ancient cult of the three missionaries of the Maas.
Otger's greatness lies in his hiddenness. He crossed the sea, went up to Rome, and spent his strength among strangers, never in the first place, never named a bishop, always the servant of the Church's mission — and God set him for centuries beside the very bishops he had served, in one shrine and one feast.
Let us ask Saint Otger to obtain for us his own gladness in serving without recognition, and today take up one hidden task for God's kingdom that no one will praise.
